Significance (53 page)

The front door had been left on the latch and lights were on in the living room and the kitchen. Quietly he pushed open the first door and took a few paces forward so that he could see over the back of the couch. He expected to find her there asleep, but she wasn't there. He tried the kitchen and she wasn't there either. For once she'd actually gone up to bed instead of waiting up for him. For once she'd been sensible.

He got a glass from the cabinet and opened the bottle of whisky Marilyn had bought in the duty
-
free as she did every year. A gift for the Clements. Oh well. He poured out a measure and added equal parts of water from the tap. He sipped it slowly, aware of its curative warmth.

He did not sit down – he had spent far too long sitting on hard seats – but leaned against the counter, trying to absorb and dispel all that happened that day and in the days before.

Surveying the room, he noticed that Marilyn had left her notebook lying open near the window by the sink. That was unlike her, she tended to always have it to hand, along with a pen. He'd take it up with him when he went to bed, put it where she usually kept it on the bedside table. He pictured himself doing this, saw in the dimly lit room of his imagination, her hair tumbling over the pillow, bleached of its vivid colour in the dark.

If she woke he'd touch her sleep
-
warm cheek, tell her how much he loved her, needed her. Ask her, did she know how much he loved her? Did he tell her that enough?

He sensed that he had been punished for his indiscretion with the young woman who'd followed him. There had been no need for him to act the way he had, it would have been easy enough to be kind to her while also explaining in no uncertain terms that he was married and loved his wife. But then he had also been ashamed because of Aaron. His whole life had been blighted in one way or another by Aaron. And he had been attracted to the blonde girl, flattered and confused by the whole situation.

Now he had been punished.

Punished too, for whatever terrible thing it was he had done or tried to do or dreamed of doing, once long ago, to his pathetically vulnerable sibling.

He had enough education and training in psychology to recognise the symptoms and causes and difficulties in his own psyche, yet seeing them, knowing them intimately, did not bring about a cure. His guilt was eternal, because he was the lucky one; the firstborn son who escaped the curse that befell the second child.

He poured another shot of whisky into his glass, didn't add water this time, wanted to feel its burning golden sting. He shouldn't have opened the Scotch. Single malt, aged for twenty years in oak casks. The good stuff.

He'd pretend the liquid had evaporated.

‘Mar,' he'd plead when she scolded him, ‘it was only the angel's share.' She'd demand to know what that meant and he'd explain that it was the term used to describe the reduction in volume that occurred when whisky was aged.

She'd like that; the idea that something as prosaic as the manufacture of hard liquor could create such a poetic term to describe a merely physical side effect of the process. He smiled, imagining her smile.

He knew he should eat something, but worried it would lay heavily on his stomach. Just whisky. A little whisky to help him sleep.

He left the bottle on the counter, put the glass in the sink and ran cold water into it. He switched off the light, then did the same in the living room. He checked the front door meaning to lock it and discovered that the key was nowhere to be found. This meant that, theoretically, Aaron could go AWOL again, but Scott was too tired now to do anything about it except silently pray that Aaron had learnt his lesson and lightning doesn't strike in the same place twice. Then, wearily, gratefully, he crept quietly up the stairs.

The door to Aaron's room was closed. Usually it was left open a few inches or so, because at certain times Aaron would not open doors for himself – though he was quite capable of doing it – but would stand behind them rocking either from side to side or to and fro. On a couple of occasions, he had done this so violently that his head hammered a slow hollow rhythm on the wooden panel and a yellow
-
purple bruise spread across his forehead like a stigmata to show his suffering.

Scott opened the door a crack and saw, reflected in the dressing table mirror, the humped shape of Aaron under the white cloud of the duvet. His breathing was heavy and slow with deepest sleep. Faintly, Scott detected the acrid aroma of warm urine.

This, Scott thought, would be the last time. No more trips to France for Aaron. No more trips anywhere – not with him and Marilyn babysitting anyway.
There were respite homes for people like him and after a day or two Aaron would get used to it. In this way their parents might also be eased toward the idea of permanent residential care for their youngest child – their lost boy, their borrowed angel.

There it was, that word again, angel. How his mother could conceive of Aaron as an angel of any sort was beyond him, but this is what she said, filtering reality, he supposed, through the Victorian sentimentality of the novels she read;
Anne of Green Gables
and Dickens and Willa Cather and
Little Women
and
Gone With the Wind
. Her favourite films were
Inn of the Seventh Happiness
,
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
and the one about the little deaf
-
mute girl, Helen Keller. She cried with all the predictability convention demanded of a woman of her age and generation. Especially when the children were saved and the dedicated teacher at last reached the lonely, silent, dark world the little girl existed in.

But no one had succeeded in reaching Aaron so far and he was not condemned by some rare syndrome or inherited disease to die young. He was healthy and robust, would before long add the muscle, strength and bulk of true manhood to his willowy frame and then what might happen?

Scott crossed the hall to the bathroom. The frosted glass there showed a limpid pinky grey light pressed against it, the sun edging upwards from the eastern horizon, illuminating the distant clouds before it peeped into view.

He splashed cold water on his face avoiding his reflection in the mirror, knowing too well how he would look – exhausted, in need of a shave, guilty.

He dried his hands, picked up Marilyn's notebook from the top of the laundry basket and crossed to their bedroom where the door was (in a reverse of the usual state of affairs) half open. At the threshold he saw at once that the bed was empty, the covers as flat and smooth as becalmed sea. But not believing his eyes, he flicked the light switch on.

Where had she gone? He had felt her presence here, seen her in his mind's eye minutes ago when he rehearsed laying her notebook on the bedside table. He stepped quickly forward and put the book in place as if that act would reset the real events that were happening into the assumed pattern. He looked around the room. The curtains hadn't been drawn and the windows were all shut – nothing but the very worst winter weather or storms made Marilyn and he sleep without a healthy dose of fresh air.

There was a third room upstairs – the Clements' bedroom which, over the years, out of respect for their privacy, Scott and Marilyn always locked on arrival, placing the key out of sight on the top of the door frame.

That's where she was! Of course, it made sense, she would sleep in the master bedroom, because it was at the front of the house, because the extension phone was there.

He tried the door handle, turning it down then pushing with his shoulder. Locked. He drummed the pads of his fingers on the wood, called softly, ‘Mar? Mar! It's me.' Then rattled the handle to indicate his intent.

He tried a second time, increasing the volume of his voice, the weight and speed of his knock, the rattling of the handle.

He dropped to his haunches, put his eye to the keyhole and saw, outlined in tendrils of out of focus dust, the far wall of the room softly lit by weak pinkish light. No key in the lock.

Because.

Because Marilyn…

He tried to finish the end of that thought, even as he heaved himself upright again and stretching, groped with his fingertips along the dusty lintel. He found the key and flying in the face of logic, unlocked and opened the door. The Clements had a beautiful antique bed, carved and painted white, an elaborate armoire, a full length cheval glass, everything one would expect in a sophisticated and well
-
to
-
do French couple's home. But it was overlaid with chaos; an untidy pile of
Le Mondes
on the bed, along with mail, box files, a plastic laundry basket filled with clothes and a guitar. Coats were heaped on a low upholstered chair, glossy magazines and paperbacks were stacked in three clumsy towers under the window, a laptop computer sat incongruously on a dressing table surrounded by a silver
-
backed hand mirror and matching hairbrush. Before leaving for their holiday they had collected all of the detritus of their lives and stored it haphazardly in the one room they knew their visitors never used.

Yet at that moment the room looked ransacked.

He fled, leaving the door open, the key still in the lock. He returned to Aaron's room, creeping in on silent feet, circling the bed and studying the form on the bed, Aaron's face slack on the pillow. No point waking him. No answers there, only another problem to be dealt with, Aaron wanting food, wanting the toilet, not wanting to be washed or shaved. And he'd pissed himself. Closer, the smell was stronger.

Scott ran downstairs again. Flicking on every light in the house, he looked in the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, the cupboard under the stairs. Went out the front door where the hire car was still parked, peered inside its windows hopefully, hopelessly, for why would Marilyn be there?

Then back through the house, searching his memory for rooms he had forgotten existed, secret rooms that led from one to another in a maze, as in certain dreams he'd sometimes had, and wasn't it said that in such dreams the house symbolised the mother?

Into the kitchen again, taking the key for the back door from its hook on the whatnot, fumbling to unlock it, then out to the garden. Night evaporating. Pale grey light, the grass sprinkled with dew, the greenhouse ghostly at the end of the garden. He might find Marilyn inside it, writing, making detailed notes about the delicate white hairs on a heart
-
shaped leaf, or the wiry tendrils a pea plant wraps around sticks, string, walls, other plants, itself. It would be no surprise to find her there amongst the tomatoes and chillies and cucumbers, sitting cross
-
legged on a square of cardboard on the floor, her eyes closed so that she could listen more acutely to every sound. The birdsong, the constant distant thrum or roar of something like a river, or traffic, the imperceptible creak of a root growing under the soil, the furious buzz of a drugged bumble bee blundering in the boudoir of a magnificent red poppy.

He studied the greenhouse carefully from where he'd paused near the house; the lawn seemed like a green sea he would struggle to pass. The window at the top had been opened to control the temperature, and the uppermost leaves of a huge tomato plant spilled out of it giving the impression that the plant had forced open the window in a bid to escape.

Deep down he knew Marilyn wouldn't be there and that was why he lingered, postponing the moment when he ran out of places to search for her.

She had once said, and he had laughed, that it hurt her to write. Her expression told him she was in earnest.

‘Your hand?' he said, stupidly.

‘No.'
Then she wouldn't say more, because he had laughed and she took the comment about her hand as sarcasm.

He swayed for a moment on the edge of the path, then stepped onto the grass and crossed to the greenhouse where he peered in through its open door. She wasn't there. Of course she wasn't there.

She had left him, as he'd always known she would. Because he didn't deserve her, because his heart was ice.

The Love Parade

Gerhardt Miller, feeling virtuous, left his lover in bed in order to walk the dog. How he had found himself in love with Henri, a provincial French schoolmaster, the owner of a toffee
-
coloured daschund called Proust, was still beyond him. They had met at the Love Parade in Berlin in 2004. Three years of this strange, wonderful, forbidden enchantment, always feeling that he should leave France, return to his birthplace of Cologne and the pretence of heterosexuality. Lonely, unsuccessful heterosexuality. He was a good
-
looking man. He knew that. Women fell for him. He dated, but nothing stuck.

Proust wriggled his rump with joy as he saw Gerhardt open the drawer where the dog lead was kept, and when Gerhardt bent to attach the lead to the collar he leapt up to lick his face, coating his cheek with fishy smelling slime.

Still holding the lead, with Proust eagerly following, claws clicking over the tiled floor, Gerhardt rinsed his face and dried it with paper towels. They went out through the back door, leaving it unlocked so that he would have no need for keys. Proust strained at the leash and Gerhardt released the catch that let the rein spool out to its full length, so that the dog trotted smartly along, long nose like the tip of an arrow, twenty paces ahead of him. Gerhardt had given up allowing the dog off the lead. Shouting ‘Proust! Proust!' was embarrassing – even more so as the dog showed absolutely no sign that this was his name or that he even knew the handsome man with the black hair, five o'clock shadow and baggy green combat pants.